Truthout staff writer Dahr Jamail has written a sobering piece on climate disruption, a crisis caused and accelerated by a world wrought by the industrial revolution. As many climate change deniers like to point out, carbon levels in the air have fluctuated for over 400,000 years, and our planet has warmed and cooled due to natural cycles of carbon in our atmosphere. While it's true that carbon levels have waxed and waned over hundreds of thousands of years, we have never seen the rapid spike in carbon levels that's occurred in the past 100 years. From the records climate scientists have kept, that spike is unprecedented. And given the proliferation of extreme weather conditions and events in the last 15-20 years, the evidence that human activity plays a significant role in climate change is, as Jamail notes, scientifically indisputable.

The protestations of those who like to say that the "debate" over human-caused climate change is not settled are based on motivations other than objective argument with the finer points of scientific data. In other words, climate change deniers want politicians and voters to think that factories, vehicles, aircraft, cattle farming practices and other carbon-emitting activities that humans have a hand in do not contribute to climate change. To admit that they do means the very industries that power industrial economies (most particularly, the fossil fuel industry) will have to be regulated or put out of business to keep our planet habitable for humans - and other life forms we need for our survival.

It just got a lot more important to tell Secretary Kerry that the Keystone XL pipeline is not in our national interest.

This week, we moved one big step closer to a final decision when the State Department inspector general gave the seal of approval to the State Department's oil-industry written, sham environmental analysis - turning a blind eye to the clear conflict of interest in allowing TransCanada to handpick the oil-industry contractor who wrote the report.

While the flawed environmental analysis clearly shows that Keystone XL has a significant impact on climate change pollution,1 many are speculating that the report gives Secretary Kerry and President Obama room to go either way in their final decision.

The final decision could come down to which side makes the most noise. The oil industry is going to the mat right now, using shady robocalls in pipeline states to collect comments in support of the pipeline. We need to speak much, much louder.

Keystone XL has become a watershed test to determine if President Obama and Secretary Kerry's action on climate change will match their increasingly strong rhetoric.

We don't know how they're going to decide. But we know that their words are not enough. We know that the president and secretary of state simply can't lead on climate as long as they are giving the green light to foreign oil companies to double down on extraction of the very dirtiest kinds of fossil fuels, at our nation's expense.

And we know that they are going to make a final decision soon. President Obama recently told governors gathered at the White House that he expected a decision in the coming months, the first time he has committed to a substantive timeline.2

We have one last chance to officially tell President Obama not to approve the dirty Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

By now, we all know what will happen if we tap dirty Canadian tar sands reserves with the Keystone XL pipeline -- catastrophic climate disaster. The last public comment period on the pipeline ends this week and numbers really count. We need to show President Obama the huge political and scientific risk of approving the Keystone XL.

The last time the State Department was accepting comments, we submitted over 1 million as a movement. And the pressure worked -- the pipeline is still not approved and the President is still on the fence about the project. Let's beat that number this time around with more than 1 million against the pipeline, and show that our movement is growing.

The arguments for building the pipeline have bordered on the ridiculous. Despite an argument that the Keystone XL will help the economy, the State Department admits that the project will create a grand total of 35 permanent jobs. Meanwhile, the oil spills that are bound to follow it could wipe out the livelihoods of farmers, fishing communities, and ranchers along the pipeline route, as well as threatening our food supply. The pipeline is even projected to raise gas prices by making it easier to export oil from North America.

There’s just one reason to build this pipeline: to line the pockets of Big Oil. Oil giants like Exxon and TransCanada have already sunk billions into tar sands extraction, and the Keystone XL is key to making the operation profitable. Without it, a lot of Canada’s toxic tar sands might stay in the ground. That will be bad news for oil companies, but a huge victory for the climate.

This is the last milestone before the President makes his decision on the pipeline. By showing Obama the breadth of opposition to the Keystone XL, we can remind him of the political costs of approving it. That’s why we want to exceed 1 million comments, and that’s why every single member of the SumOfUs.org community counts.

KXL needs to be refused. All expansion of fossil fuel extraction/use needs to be refused. Listen to the 97% of all climate scientists - THEY ARE IN AGREEMENT = We can NOT increase our use of fossil fuel.

We need full implementation of alternative power generation sources - clean power generation. Wind Turbines - Solar Cells - water conversion to Hydrogen to be used in power plants - thorium reactors ( safe - smaller footprint - does not produce nuclear weapons grade material - no chance of a Fukashima or a Chernobyl style failure/meltdown ) - etc etc etc

We have clean VIABLE alternatives to fossil fuel - WE NEED TO USE THEM TO OUR FULL CAPABILITY.